CoWriting Kazakh: Learning a New Script with a Robot

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In the Republic of Kazakhstan, the transition from Cyrillic to Latin alphabet raises challenges to training an entire population in writing the new script. This paper presents a CoWriting Kazakh system, an extension of the existing CoWriter system, aiming to implement an autonomous social robot that would assist children in transition from the old Cyrillic alphabet to a new Latin alphabet. With the aim to investigate which learning strategy yields better learning gains, we conducted an experiment with 67 children, aged 8-11 years old, who interacted with a robot in a CoWriting Kazakh learning scenario. Participants were asked to teach a humanoid NAO robot how to write Kazakh words using one of the scripts, Latin or Cyrillic. We hypothesized that a scenario in which the child is asked to mentally convert the word to Latin would be more effective than having the robot perform conversion itself. Results show that the CoWriter was successfully applied to this new script-switching task. The findings also suggest interesting gender differences in the preferred method of learning with the robot.